Metroliners Catching Up To Speed Of 'Bullet' Trains

With little notice or fanfare, the Metroliners that run between New York and Washington have finally achieved routine speeds of 120 to 125 miles per hour.

That achievement has been brought about by a $2-billion reconstruction of Amtrak's main line in the Northeast Corridor that has taken eight years and is now 95 percent complete. It has gone almost unnoticed in the public debate that has lately swirled about the federal financing of Amtrak, but it has enabled the Metroliners' speed to approach that of the Japanese and French "bullet trains" about as closely as is likely in the foreseeable future.

Now that high speeds are common in the corridor, however, locomotive engineers say that pressure to maintain shortened schedules is often forcing them to run the trains at 120 mph on stretches where speed limits are lower. The pressure "has caused us to act like we've got a 500-ton Maserati out there," said one locomotive engineer, referring to the high-speed Italian sports car.

Neither the individual engineers nor Amtrak or federal monitors say there is a serious safety problem.The engineers say that in lower speed zones, they open the throttle to the maximum only on straight stretches where they consider it safe - to 120 mph on a straightaway rated for 110 mph, for example. However, their union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, has complained to Amtrak about the situation.

The argument has been brought to the fore by the nearly completed track reconstruction.

In the last eight years, Amtrak has replaced the old clackety-clack of jointed rails with quiet, seamless ones. It has installed concrete ties for greater stability, every grade crossing between Washington and New Haven, Conn., has been eliminated and selected stretches of right-of-way have been fenced off.

The signaling system is now being overhauled. When the work is completed in about a year, Amtrak officials say, the Northeast's main line, technically speaking, will be the equal of any.

Immovable curves, bridges and tunnels, plus the need to run freight and commuter trains on the line, keep the trains from reaching 143 mph, like those on Japan's Tokyo-to-Osaka route, or 170 mph, like France's Paris-to-Lyon train. Both those trains run on new track lines built from scratch for high- speed passenger use only.

Except for the Japanese and French bullet trains, "this is the state-of- the-art railroad in the world," said Dennis F. Sullivan, Amtrak's vice president of operations and maintenance.

Now that the project is nearing completion, the hourlong delays that often plagued travelers between Washington and New York at the height of reconstruction in the early 1980s have mostly disappeared. In 1976 and 1977, for example, less than 50 percent of the Metroliners ran on time, according to Amtrak.

Express Metroliners now run from New York's Pennsylvania Station to Washington's Union Station in a scheduled time of 2 hours and 49 minutes. Midtown Manhattan and downtown Philadelphia are 68 minutes apart. The Metroliners' on-time record, according to Amtrak, is now better than 80 percent.

And as the rebuilding work has progressed, speed limits have been raised piecemeal, section by section, to a maximum of 120 mph on nearly a third of all main-line track between Washington and New York. By the end of next year, when the signaling improvements are expected to be finished, roughly half the Washington-to-New York track is to be rated at that speed.

Any rider on a Metroliner can easily verify that speeds around 120 are often reached, simply by timing how long it takes to run between white-painted mileposts planted on the western side of the main line tracks.

The main stretches where a 120-mph speed limit is now established are between Metuchen and Trenton, N.J.; between Wilmington, Del., and Baltimore, and between Baltimore and Washington.

The electric locomotives and modern, stainless-steel cars that run between New York and Washington are rated at 125 mph, Sullivan said. Locomotives, he said, have been test-run at 130 mph. But in practice, he said, each carries an engine governor set at 120 to 125 mph.

The original Metroliners in the late 1960s, operated by the Penn Central, also ran at 120 mph. But according to Amtrak, the national railroad agency that took over all passenger service from private railroads in 1971, no money was provided to maintain the track at that level. It deteriorated, and speeds had to be reduced.

The upper end of the Northeast line, between New York and Boston, does not yet have any 120-mph sections. The tracks have been improved there, but electrified tracks - necessary for high-speed operation - go only as far north as New Haven. Further electrification is awaiting the completion of a major track construction project in greater Boston.